Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial for Film: Custom Mountains

how's it going everybody and welcome back to the channel this is going to be the final video for the beginner series but don't worry there will be another series coming very soon and before we get started i just want to give thanks to my patrons or right here i remember there are two levels of patrons you can participate in the first level you'll get some discord goodies and more access to me on discord and the second level you get a thank you here and you get to see my videos early access and one of the things that i included in the last video was that every now and then i will be sharing some assets for my patrons at the level two as well but if you can do the patreon then just leaving a like leaving a comment goes a long way for the youtube algorithm and for my videos to get out there now for this particular video we're going to be talking about the background mountains and i'm going to divide it into sections one it's going to be the quick part which is just using a pre-made asset and the other one we're actually going to make the asset ourselves and we're going to go back into quicksort mixer to add some structures to it since we're done with this series one thing that i would like is i like to see what you made with this so there's a discord down below so you can join and we're gonna have a specific channel for people to share what they have made with this series i want you to be creative uh do whatever comes to mind with all the things that i taught you because that is the best way to learn how to use a new tool is by practicing and doing it yourself so uh create something post it on our discord and i'm going to gather the best pictures so i'm going to showcase them on the channel we'll be also talking about that in a coming video now let's get to the video okay here we are and like i say in the beginning um there are going to be two parts we're gonna do the easy and quick part first and then we're gonna go into the more complex one but still the one that everybody can do so for this we are going to be using an asset that is in the permanent free collection so everyone should be able to access this asset at no cost is this landscape background is going to be a link in the description so you can go and download it if you haven't already and as you can see this one contains several types of mountains that we could use for background it has various different settings from kind of like this desert looking to this one with a lot of trees so we have a lot of options that we use for our planet now one of the things you have to bear in mind is these are backgrounds so i would not use these four terrains but four backgrounds actually look pretty nice now this pro this is made so far for unreal engine uh until unreal engine 4.26 i believe you can use it with for the 27 um but if you're going to use it with unreal engine 5 like i did all you have to do is make it into a project with the previous version and then migrate it like i've shown before so once you have it in the engine are you going to see that you have this photo or background and we have some maps over here let's actually go to the overview map so you can see all the backgrounds it contains all right here we are and that took a little while because i needed to compile the shaders but as you can see this pack is very good for background so we have various things that we can choose from it has these 360 degree background so the point of these is that you have your staging area or your landscape or whatever you have it here in the middle and then you have this surrounding your staging area or you can just use the modular ones which are down here and there are several of them however i have used these the 360 i have used them as modular as well this is uh one of the best things about this pack is that everything can be used modular pretty much so let's just add that to our map and the way we're going to do that is we're going to go into the main folder there is a meshes folder and you can see it also comes with some trees a couple materials and we have several folders here so we have the 360 ones if you want to grab some of these and we have the modular one so i'm going to go let's see the modular fall and i think this is the same one that i had in the other level so we're just going to throw it in here and see how it looks and as you can see these are huge so they are meant to be in the background i'm just going to go and do this and throw it all the way back here and let's see how that looks from our camera and if i press letter g very cool actually let's just get out of the camera go back here and we'll probably reduce the size because it is occupying a lot of space and i want a little bit more variation in between the two pillars so i'm just going to do let's say a little bit more than half go back to my camera and do like this hold the key of alt so we can duplicate it and maybe do something like this and we have a little bit of variation over there and if you want it you can extend and have even bigger mountains in the background so let's say we want to have something much bigger here so we can duplicate it towards the back holding the letter alt the key of alt and turn it around i'm going to let's just do like this yes we have a little bit more variation so i'm gonna throw it all the way towards the back let's see how that looks with our camera and again just so we have more depth to our scene take another one of these and one of the things i like to do is we can scale this in the z-axis so maybe this one we do this and it's not as big and there you go just lower this a little bit just so we have a bit more depth in there and as you can see that's the quick mountains that i had on the other setting however i'm going to show you another way to do this in blender so we can get a much more customized kind of landscape if you just want to throw that out there in the back all right like i mentioned in the beginning this part is going to be in blender it's going to be not super complex it's actually pretty easy we're going to showcase an addon add-on so you say it but uh well you just have to use blender so i think from 2.8 beyond you should be able to have this already installed in blender you don't have to download anything extra but i'm going to use this version right here so i'm going to start with a general and if you've never used blender before i'm not gonna go over how to use blender just what's specific to this tool but maybe a little bit about navigation scroll wheel up and down zoom in if you hold the key of shift you can pan around if you just hold your middle mouse you can rotate and that's about most of what you need for navigation so i'm going to get rid of this light and the cube that's like the norm here in blender and we're gonna go into edit preferences and over here uh you're gonna hit the add-ons tab and we're gonna look for landscape and you're going to get this little add-on right here it's called mesh amt landscape this is what's going to allow you to do what we're going to do right now so after you have that checked you don't even have to restart blender all you have to do is shift a and mesh and you're gonna go into landscape okay once you click this you're gonna get this little landscape right here but make sure you don't click away because if you do then you're going to lose the menu to be able to do this in real time once you click off there is a menu right here that you can use for this if you want to do any extra modifications but you have to regenerate every single time and the changes are not in real time like i said in the beginning so it's better just to be at a level where you're happy with this with your settings and after that you can do anything else so as you can see we have tons of parameters that we can play with i'm not going to go too in depth into this however i'm going to add a little bit more subdivisions here so i'm going to go to 256 by 256. and it's going to add a little bit more detail to my landscape so you can also alter the size so if you want to make it a little bit bigger as well you can just do 4x4 and we actually have a kind of like a nice white mountain and then the main thing that you're probably going to want to use is the operator presets so over here you click here you have a ton of things that you can choose from you even have a large terrain you have a mesa you have a canyon which i think it's pretty useful especially if you're doing deserts uh you also have the mountain number two which is the one that we're going to use because we don't need kind of like those peak mountains and you see these are going to be background mountains so i'm not going to fully worry about their resolution and how high they are i just like the fact they're like this and usually when you see mountains on the horizon you don't see them peak you just see them this way so i'm going to stick with this on the high we have 0.4 you can increase or decrease this if you wanted to if we do 0.5 it's a little bit taller i think this is fine and we're going to leave it at this for now so i'm just going to click off we're ready with our mountain now before we texture this because we're going to texture this in mixer we are actually going to have to unwrap it so as you can see this is kind of dense if you were talking about in terms of game asset this is a little bit dense for a background asset we could have maybe done 128 and again that's up to you and your system but know that we can always use nana because we're using unreal engine 5. so for that we're just going to go into the uv editing mode and again i'm not a blender expert so if i'm doing something wrong or if you know of an easier way to do this just let me know in the comments down below i'm really happy to hear new tips and suggestions now with that we're going to press the letter u we're going to click unwrap and there you go now we have our object unwrapped completely unwrapped in here and that's all we needed to do very nice and painless so what i'm going to do now is just make sure that i have my mesh selected and we're going to export it out as an fbx so we're going to go here export fbx okay here we are in pixel mixer and again i do have a playlist for beginners it's going to be down in the description below if you're interested in going more in depth with this texturing program but for now i'm just going to dedicate uh this tutorial to the tools we're going to use to get our background mountains so if you go into setup model settings type we're going to change this plane to custom model now i'm going to load what i just took out of blender which is this land underscore back open that and as you can see we have our mountains right here and let's see um texture resolution 4k again this depends on what you're trying to achieve it doesn't have to be 4k to be honest it can be 2048 so then we go to layers and we're going to be adding a surface so once you click here it's going to take you to your local library and this depends on what you have downloaded if not if there's something else you want you can just go online and look for it as if you're browsing quick so bridge so i think i'm going to use this let's see how that works okay this actually looks cool but it does have a little bit of vegetation which really doesn't go what we're trying to do so let me look for another type of ground we can search here for surface and we're going to change that to let's see the breeze displacement ground not grasp the ground and let's see stone let's see what which one we like about here uh this one's kind of cool dry rocky ground i'm actually gonna download this one and now that is in my mixer library i'm just gonna click on it and i'm just going to get rid of this layer there you go so now we have some nice and cool mountains and again this is going to be in the background so it should not be affected much with the resolution or anything else going to uncheck displacement because i really don't think we need displacement you can choose whatever other textures you want but um let's just try to mix it up a little bit so let's go here and ground and look for rocks and over here in rocks we have different types of color rocks some of them have moss i don't know let's just do this canyon sandstone i'm gonna download it all right this actually looks a lot better and one of the things i'm gonna do i like this one as a base yeah i do like this one as a base a lot i'm going to uncheck displacement because again this is an asset that's going to be seen from far away and we can also change the projection so right now it's a box projection which doesn't look bad but it can look better if we do tiling so as you can see that changed a little bit and we can actually tile let's see if we tiled it two times uh that actually looks much much better all right so if i turn on these one and make sure that this one isn't tiling as well what we're going to do is see if we can transfer some of the elements from this one into this one so for that we're going to use a mask stack so this little piece right here and we're going to add a curvature so the curvature if you hit the key number nine this is what's a curvature map is just detecting the edges and crevices now we can change it to something else like edges only or we could do cavities only something like that as you can see it's following the curvature from my underlying mix meaning it's following the curvature of the canyon sandstone that we have underneath and we can play with the levels to make it brighter or darker i'm actually going to leave it like this and see how it looks by pressing the number one all right so as you can see we have some variation in our cracks and crevices because if i turn this off then this little variations that i have over here they go away so again this is if you wanted to add a little bit more styling and you want to get some more customized landscape for your background this is the way to go and you can get tons of this with the blender adam that i just showed you so again if you didn't watch the episode before this where i use mixer with the pillar all you have to do is go to export uh search for a folder where you want to export this out and you can actually export your fvx model as well so you don't have to look for it or place it somewhere else these all i always leave from default and make sure you change the resolution to the desired one in this case is 2048 because it always defaults to the lowest resolution okay here we are in our map and what i did is actually just hit the mountains that we have placed in the beginning and we're going to place a mountain that we just created but before that and again in case somebody hasn't seen the episode before i'm just going to create the material here real quick usually when you import something from uh anywhere by default unreal creates a material for you so just delete that three vector content that i just deleted and start putting your textures here so we have our albedo is our base color we have our ao is over here ao is ao we also have our normal map and we have a roughness map as well we can just throw in here there you go so i'm going to apply and save this and because this is the material that unrail created by default it's going to get instantly applied to the mesh now if i take the mesh over here you can see it's pretty tiny but we're just going to throw it to the background so it doesn't matter that much now i'm just going to go uh probably around 50 when it comes to the size so make sure you have the padlock on and let's there you go 50. i'm going to throw it all the way to the back and we're going to go back into our uh perspective i'm sorry the camera so we can see what's going on so i'm just going to put this here hold the key of alt maybe take another one place it here and we can actually rotate it as well just to get some variation and modularity out of that we can even make it bigger if we needed to and i'm going to get another one for here now let's just create some depth and make them like this one i'm just gonna make it closer this one i'm gonna make it further away i'm going to take out another one like this and i'm just going to erase it just a tad let's see how that looks and there you go we have a little bit of depth in our scene so what i did here is i just created a very simple system just to change the coloring of our textures really quickly kind of like what uh quixote does so it only consists of a vector three vector three is just hold the key of three and you get one of those uh you look for the multiply node or you can just hold the letter m and there you go and we're doing a vector three multiplied by a number and then all that we're combining it by multiplying it with our texture sample into our default base color now what i'm going to do is i'm going to apply this and i'm going to actually create an instance so i can move those in real time now i'm going to get this instance over here there you go so we can change our colors and whoops one of the things i missed is that the parameters are not scalar so this one is scalar parameter so you can just pull the key of s and click that will give you a scalar parameter that you can change in your instance but we need to change this one as well so i'm just going to right click convert to parameter and i'm just typing with color there you go gonna apply and save and now we can come into the material instance and as you can see we have the intensity and the color so the good thing about this is again it can change in real time so maybe around here probably let's do an intensity of 2 or minus 0.5 like that make a little bit darker wait let's just do 0.5 there you go so we make it a little bit darker and yeah i think so it doesn't look as reddish and you can even lower this number and maybe add some more fog which is what i had in the short that i did we can actually add more fox sheets and we can cover this terrain over here with some of these pieces which i'm going to do just so it doesn't have a flat horizon so i'm going to time lapse this i'll see you in a little bit all right there you go just to break that horizon line a little bit and i think there are some lines right here that i left those can easily be taken care of by just grabbing these pulling some in front and let's see how that looks real quick okay there you go just to make sure that we are breaking that horizon line and as you can see you can add more mountains if you wish but the whole purpose of this tutorial is to show you two different ways of adding background assets all right everybody that is it for this video thank you so much for watching and i would like to know did you enjoy this video series would you like to see more is there something from a beginner's standpoint that i missed because i'm going to follow this with an intermediate level series so let me know what you think in the comments down below don't forget to leave a like follow me on twitter join our discord to get all your questions answered and i'll see in the next video

Channel: MR3D-Dev

Views: 2,864

Keywords: Custom asset quixel mixer, unreal engine 5 custom assets, quixel mixer texturing, quixel tutorial beginner, quixel mixer to unreal engine 5, Custom assets unreal engine 5, quixel mixer, quixel, texturing, Megascans, Unreal Engine 5, Realistic environment, unreal engine 5 for filmmaking, UE5 alien world, mr3d-dev, emissive material unreal engine 5, ue5, megascans

Id: GqT3s90GRcA

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021